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Monday, May 15, 2006

Look Back in Ingres

June 2003. Mark Barrenechea leaves Oracle (on the day it announces its purchase of PeopleSoft - this is a total coincidence, he tells ComputerWorld). And joins Computer Associates (CA) [CA Press Release]. He tells Dan Farber:

"All markets consolidate over time. Microsoft has the desktop, Oracle is the database leader, and SAP is the leading application vendor. The market that hasn't consolidated is management software. For me personally, I can have high impact at CA. CA has the opportunity to be recognized as one of top two software companies on earth." [ZDNet, July 2003]

"For me, it means taking 84 [fiscal] quarters with operating experience in software and now being able to apply that to creating independent companies and helping build management teams and what I think of as relevancy in the market. That's an opportunity I could not pass up."

High impact, huh?

Footnote on Ingres. This is the name of a French painter (pronounced ANGr) [Wikipedia] as well as a historically important database system [Wikipedia]. Michael Stonebraker, the inventor of that database, once told me he had been unaware of the painter at the time.